


Horatio on the Dignity of Man

by schiarire



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-18
Updated: 2006-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:05:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schiarire/pseuds/schiarire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Orangutan</p>
    </blockquote>





	Horatio on the Dignity of Man

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Orangutan

 

 

Horatio on the Dignity of Man

You are older than he is, but he is superior, in every way: more intelligent, better-looking, better-born; he cannot be passed. He is a fact of life, as oxygen: lesser in numbers than nitrogen, but at once more essential. You are his Pylades. His Patrocles. His ancient Greek or Roman.

But he is a modern man.

~

But you have a life, surely, an independent existence, apart from him? When he goes out of the door, you do not shut down, bones and braincells clicking idly like bits of a clock? You have a room of your own? Decorations and wallpaper and shelves of books, some with leather covers and other with yellow pages, pages you've wanted to fold back and mark, pages in which you recognized something of this self which you own, somewhere part-time, between the lines?

You have parents, interests, duties. You have dark hair, dark eyes; thick, long-jointed fingers. You have a wardrobe made of oak and a desk made of oak. You have curtains. You have candles. You light them with a careful turn of long-jointed fingers: unique.

The night before last was the night before he left for Germany again and he kept you up, excited, sardonic and drunk. You went on until you couldn't read the labels on the bottles of wine. The next morning he left at a steady, rolling pace, unstoppable; you woke up and felt your skull collapsing inwards, seizing like a dog with hydrophobia. But you woke up at dawn and you saw him off. You embraced him and you did not begrudge him the clear, unaffected humour in his eyes. You said kind words and promised to write.

You know that you will write tedious, stiff letters creaking with the dusty minutiae of the life that he has left behind. You hope that by including everything - the clock that broke, dinner, the light of the moon on the steps of the castle - you will create, you will catalogue Elsinore; you will build a library of the mind. There will be little drawers with keys and cards that say: pull here. And when you open a drawer, inside will be a room, just as he left it; in that room, the room as it is now, without him. And perhaps, eventually, what that room will be some months from now, when he returns. The progression of time is unmarred by his absence. Nothing comes stuck except your thoughts, of an evening: what to do? and with whom?

You hope that although your letters are dull they are at least comprehensive; that they will serve the purpose of those who do not create: that they will preserve.

~

His letters, of course, are hard to categorize. Hard to box up and explicate. Some are short; some long. Some unhappy. Some glowing with fervor and anticipation. Some messy. Some neat. Some like philosophical tracts. Some like diary entries.

And some that are really addressed to you, you specifically; you, his best and oldest friend. Among these, too, there is diversity, but - less so. Usually they are tender. He thinks of you often, he writes; things remind him of you, he remembers punchlines to jokes only known to the pair of you. These are either warm and pleasant letters or depressing, awful confessions of homesickness, despair, perceived inadequacy. His own. The inadequacy of others. It all seems one to him.

To you, it isn't one at all; it is ludicrous, to you, that there should be anything which should not come as naturally to him as the love of him does to you. So you write hesitant, clumsily-formed letters back. You write, _I think you are very smart_ , and that you are looking forward to seeing him and that nothing terrible is happening at Elsinore. If Germany is not perfect, then Denmark must be; he must have the idea, the comfort, that somewhere, there are people, that there is a place, where everything is all right, where mother and father and lover and friend live on in peace and winter coats, toiling slowly towards some distant reunion - for a holiday, perhaps - at which point nothing will have changed for the worse.

Not having the gift of his effortless informality, nor feeling that it would be appropriate to you, these letters are grueling. Still you write them. Just as you ruin your health of a night knowing that he will wake up as if nothing had happened, you write them, you answer every letter that comes regardless of content or form.

And you wait for the post; hoping that, in a foreign land, he, too, is waiting, if not every day.

~

While he is away, the girl grows lonely. You walk together in the gardens, although it is coming on winter, although Denmark is cold. You appreciate the slight metamorphosis which the temperature works on her features: the natural, healthy red beneath the skin; the occasional shudder, involuntary, of smooth shoulders under layers of silk and linen. She talks to you of books that he gave her to read, and you do not quite understand. Not that you are stupid - far from it - but you have more to do in a day than an unmarried girl or a student-prince, and at some point, the point of exhaustion which since you came of age you have known intimately, some books become a luxury, as do some ideas. Your preference for the familiar stories, which can move you by now without effort, is not defensive, but simple; you know, as do they, that there is merit in these works as well.

As there is merit in the suppressed, fluttering emotion of her voice when she speaks of him; daring not to express the extent of what she thinks or feels, for fear. In this sense you and she resemble each other more than either of you resembles him. Convention lives on in her; lives on in you. For him it is tempered and questionable. But the bright lights of theories, radiant, cannot always sustain life; rather, they seem to render it complex and brilliant, but sadder, shorter. As if it were seen from a distance. More clearly than you see, perhaps. Perhaps that is true.

You talk with her and agree: the happy ending still has a place in this world.

He thinks they are trite.

~

And you dine together, on occasion. You both like candlelight, white wine, spring green paint on plates, silver cutlery. You are careful never to give offense; so is she. This provides a framework for discourse, and in the end there is honesty in it, because you know what you will not say, and you know that she knows, and she knows what she will not say, and so on, and so the unsayable becomes a bridge between you: tenuous, but infinitely stronger than perception suggests. Like spidersilk.

The first frost comes and her thoughts about it are rather more original than yours.

Or are they - or are they, perhaps to some degree, a reflection of his thoughts, which reflect the thoughts of older, wiser men? Men with long beards and long bibliographies. Men who own telescopes. Men who paint, either for pleasure or passion. Men with high foreheads and ink on their fingers; men whose blue-veined temples cradle knowledge on this earth.

Perhaps these things are borrowed. Perhaps everything is together, a pair of a pair of a pair. Perhaps ideas flourish in reference.

And in opposition.

~

Down by the river, there are: willows, crow-flowers, daisies, and less pretty things. She stands in the long wet grasses and they dampen the hem of her skirt, bearing it down with dew. The pull of fabric like the straight lines of architecture: her skin unlike faceless chalk. She reads to you: Dante.

You like Dante: the order, the structure of being. The established conventions. He speaks Italian; she says, he is going to teach her, and her nimble tongue sculpts _la Divina Commedia_ , but it is still too much Denmark.

Denmark on your soles. It is noon and neither of you is going to Hell for a long time - nor Purgatory, neither.

~

There is something about being the person left, not the person who does the leaving, which he will not understand; loneliness, the peculiar pain of moving among the same tapestries without the same companions, will be strange to him, always. He will not know what it is to be unable to forget. To have everywhere Denmark. To have everywhere the cracks and dust of childhood, the same horse, the same cushions. He will never see the sorrow of absence on his mother's face.

This is what knowledge does.

~

And this is what life is to you: the impossible velocity of water, which always finds the roughest path to the ocean. Sometimes downhill and sometimes through valleys of willow and rosemary, valleys where men in drab trousers bury life in the earth so that life may yield life in the spring's virgin sun. Whether you strike out with or against the tide, these rivers of the land push up and finger your ribs with long thoughts; drag you under, let you breathe, let you surface, let you crawl up on the sandbanks and observe the purely reflexive action of time emptying itself: finite drifts.

And perhaps this is sobering. Perhaps it is too strong an impression of meanings and shapes; perhaps your perception, weakened by the fading light, by the approaching solstice, has already become old. Perhaps you are old before you have been poured into age. Perhaps this is why you think, necessarily, that you have some purpose; that, at some unimaginable point, your purpose will have been served out, and you will step back, and you will be free.

~

It may be for this reason that you feel it is all right to expect his return, and to tender the occasional piercing, fierce expressions of Ophelia like a knife in the fog. You know that she is not your girl. And you know also that she would not suit you - not really. She is the sum of too many traditions; has become romantic, insuperable. In fact she becomes more like him every day. In fact she comprehends this quality of mirrors, that the enormous light of impression does not, as might seem obvious, slide off her, but rather is absorbed; held, and learned from within, as a child learns to smile. In fact this is how she learns to express hope. In fact this is how she moves into his sweet realm of shadows.

Leaving you on the beaten path, surrounded by certainty. Leaving you with an expectation of happiness. Leaving you with what you have always comprehended, held within: stability, which makes dull men of lovers. But which is excellent in friends.

~

And so you miss him. You both do - she in her way. You in yours. When his father dies, you are precisely as unhappy as can be naturally expected; it is disturbing to you, who have known him, his unstoppable violence, for all your life. It puts the order of things all awry. Next there will be strange times. There will be alien happenings; foreigners will sit on the throne, wreathed in glory, and command you with gloves on their hands. The sun will rise in the wrong place and rather than set it will be revealed for what it truly is, and the scales will fall like the tidings of sleep from your eyes, and the inner cores of men will be peeled bare and held to the light. What is unnatural is also excessive, and so when this happens, there will be such a fury, such an ecstasy of passings and noise, that the true thrust of it all will be lost. Will be covered in dirt and sent down, down through earth to the distant shore. Where he will be waiting. Where he will make sense out of chaos, or failing this, make chaos bearable; the queen, who needs him now more than ever, has stopped speaking of him, and lent her affections.

This is the stage that will welcome him with slenderly bated breath. Will carry him, as the river carries you towards timelessness, towards the centre of things, where he will stand, and around him everyone else will build up all the facts and mist of Elsinore. And this fabric, this tissue of lies networked with truth will be his history and his castle. And just inside the inner gates, ah - yes. You will be waiting, awkward, almost adequate.

And it will be wonderful to see him, because wonder is created by virtue of his presence. So your thoughts turn from disorder; your thoughts turn to him.

Who is he to you?

~

There are people who, when you meet them, seem set aside by intention. Although they express uncertainty themselves, you feel no uncertainty on their behalf. You feel sure that whatever they turn their hand to, they will succeed; they will live long, untroubled lives, with the warm regard of society still on their backs. They will leave thoughtful, intelligent wills and, unperturbed by their bickering relatives, by the slow cold of dawn, pass gracefully out of this world: the stuff of legend.

He is one such. When you meet him, you sense the full weight of his presence. The weight of his future. Pulling him inexorably out of the past.

~

But then it's death that pulls him back to the castle.

~

Death that pulls him out.

~

And perhaps the only thing which you could do, now, to avoid separation, would be to share his fate - to take it upon yourself, adopt it, crawl inside its skin and breathe through the holes in the coffinwood. But even in this you cannot be together: even in this you are still apart; he goes before, even in this. You follow after. More slowly. More clumsily. Without knowing the way.

But this is what friendship means: to do that which is beyond you, for the sake of another.

~

You are all that is true to him - all that remains to him. All of the world. Where it beats, slow and clumsy, not knowing the way - in your heart of hearts.

On and on.

 


End file.
